[Media-watch] US media still hiding bad news from Americans - Toronto Star - 9/12/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1102547410018&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795

 Dec. 9, 2004. 01:00 AM

 U.S. media still hiding bad news from Americans


ANTONIA ZERBISIAS

And now the good news from America's accomplished mission in Iraq ...

The other night on ABC News Nightline, Ted Koppel asked National Public 
Radio war correspondent Anne Garrels, who has been in Iraq throughout the 
war, "When you hear people in this country, Anne, say, look, the media is 
only giving the negative side of what's going on there, why don't they ever 
show the good side, what do you tell 'em?"

"I tell them that there isn't much good to show," she replied, describing 
how even military commanders have only bad news to share.

Two weeks ago on CNN, Time's Michael Ware, who has been covering Iraq for 
two years, gave an alarming account of being trapped in his Baghdad 
compound, which is regularly bombed and encircled by "kidnap teams."

He reported that the U.S. military has "lost control" and that Americans are 
"the midwives of the next generation of jihad, of the next Al Qaeda."

At the end of the exchange, anchor Aaron Brown warned, "(O)ther people see 
the situation there differently than Michael. We talk to them as well."

The next day, when the interview was repeated, anchor Carol Lin closed with, 
"And of course there are others who disagree with that."

Never mind that those others never had Iraqi sand in their shoes, let alone 
been under fire there.

"Freedom is on the march!" "We're making progress!" "The terrorists will do 
all they can to disrupt free elections in Iraq, and they will fail."

These are just some of the slogans that U.S. President George W. Bush now 
spouts, while the American cable channels duly carry his speeches live and 
the American print media give them front-page play.

Not that they aren't sneaking in a little bad news, mind you. But not much. 
This week, we learned, mostly via a text crawl at the bottom of the screen, 
that the milestone of 1,000 U.S. troops killed in combat had been reached.

If you blinked, you would have missed news of a Pentagon "strategic" report 
to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld revealing that U.S. actions "have not 
only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they 
intended."

There was a bit in some newspapers about a damning classified cable from the 
Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Baghdad that painted a dismal 
picture of Iraq's economic, political and security prospects.

And, while it got notice when published in October, there's been no 
follow-up on a study in an esteemed British medical journal suggesting that 
up to 100,000 civilians had died since the invasion. No follow-up, that is, 
except to trash the research.

It figures that, on Tuesday in Camp Pendleton, California, all media eyes 
were on Bush giving a rousing crowd-pleaser, urging "every American to find 
some way to thank our military and to help out the military family down the 
street."

That while yesterday Rumsfeld was in Kuwait, dismissing concerns from troops 
about a lack of armour. "You go to war with the army you have," he said.

Want to guess whose comments got better play?

"Biased coverage in Iraq; Bad News Overwhelms The Good," asserted the 
Washington Times last week.

"If you trust most media accounts fed to American viewers and readers, Iraq 
is an unmitigated disaster," began Helle Dale of the right-wing Heritage 
Foundation, insisting that "40 per cent of Iraqis say their country is (now) 
better" and "at least 35 per cent want the United States to stay."

Dale exhorted readers to check all the wonderful progress being catalogued 
by the U.S. Agency for International Development (http://www.usaid.gov), 
which, if you examine carefully, doesn't contain that much good news at all.

For example, compare and contrast one vaguely-worded USAID report from last 
spring with another from last week and you'll see the dirty water situation 
has not much improved.

Still, Dale claims, "Much of this good work you will never find reported, 
precisely because no news is good news for much of the U.S. media."

Well, here's a positive piece of media news from Iraq: Farnaz Fassihi, the 
Wall Street Journal reporter whose harrowing private e-mail to friends 
describing the hazards of Baghdad made international news, is back on the 
war beat after what many suspected was a month-long suspension. She returns 
despite vicious criticism from the right that she is too "biased" to work 
there - just because she felt it was a deadly situation.

But then, what would she know?

She's just there, in very real danger of getting killed. Stateside, she's 
threatened with being shot down, along with other reporters, just for 
telling the truth.